Your drive is full and "just delete some stuff" is the worst advice an editor can give another editor. One wrong file in the trash and a delivered final breaks the next time you open it for revisions. So instead of guessing, here is the actual procedure for figuring out what is safe to remove.

Think of your editing drive like a rental house's gear cage. Some shelves hold the camera bodies that are out on this week's shoot (untouchable). Some hold backup mags from a job that wrapped six months ago (probably fine to retire). Some hold a tangle of cables nobody can identify (those are the cache files). The trick is knowing what is on which shelf before you start tossing things.

The Four Categories of Disk Usage

Every file on your editing drive falls into one of four buckets. Once you can label them, the cleanup decision becomes obvious.

Active project media. Footage, audio, graphics, and project files that are part of a job currently being cut, finished, or in revision. This is the smallest category by file count and usually the most important one.

Archive. Completed and delivered projects that you keep around in case the client comes back for a re-cut, an excerpt, or a delivery to a new platform. Useful but rarely accessed.

Regeneratable. Anything the software can recreate on demand. Cache files, render previews, optimized media, transcoded proxies, audio peak files. If you delete it, the next time you open the project the app rebuilds it. There is zero project risk here.

Abandoned. Projects you stopped working on, test renders you never deleted, footage from a pitch that did not happen, that random folder labeled "old stuff" from 2022. Nobody is coming back for these.

How to Identify Each Bucket

You do not need fancy software to tell these apart. You need file extensions, folder patterns, and modification dates.

Cache and render files live in obvious folders. In Premiere, look for Adobe Premiere Pro Auto-Save, Media Cache Files, and any folder named CFA, PEK, IMS, or MPGINDEX. After Effects writes to Adobe directories with Disk Cache subfolders. Final Cut Pro X stuffs everything into the .fcpbundle package, but inside that bundle the Render Files and Transcoded Media folders are fair game.

Project files announce themselves: .prproj, .aep, .fcpbundle, .drp, .drb. If you see one of these, treat the entire surrounding folder structure as active or archive until proven otherwise.

Modification time is your best signal for abandonment. A folder with no .prproj files newer than two years and no recent renders is almost certainly abandoned. The exception is delivered projects you might revisit, which leads to the next rule.

The Safe-to-Delete Order

Always work top to bottom. Each phase has progressively higher project risk.

Phase 1: Cache and renders. Zero risk. These get rebuilt automatically. On a typical active edit drive, cache files account for 5 to 30 percent of total usage. On a long-running project, the Adobe Media Cache often outgrows the actual source media by 5x. Empty it monthly and you will reclaim hundreds of gigabytes without touching anything that matters.

Phase 2: Proxies. Low risk. Proxies can be regenerated from the camera originals if needed. The cost is render time. If you have not opened a project in six months, dump its proxies. If the client comes back, you re-create them in an afternoon.

Phase 3: Abandoned project trees. Medium risk, but only because of human error. The file itself does not matter. The risk is misidentifying an active project as abandoned. Before you delete a project tree, search the parent folder for .prproj and .aep files modified in the last year. If nothing comes up, you can archive or delete the whole tree.

Phase 4: Unused media inside active projects. Higher risk. This is the footage that lives inside a current project's bins but never made it onto a sequence. The 420 takes you imported and never used. Removing these requires actually checking which clips are referenced on a timeline. Doing it manually is like cross-referencing every reel in a vault against the script supervisor's notes by hand. There are tools for this. Whatever you use, never bulk-delete from a project bin without verification.

What You Should Never Delete Blindly

A few hard rules that will save you a delivery emergency.

Never touch anything in a folder named AE Renders, Final Deliverables, Masters, or Approved Cuts. These often hold the only copy of a finished file that took hours to render.

Never delete files in a folder that contains a .prproj or .aep modified in the last seven days. That is an active edit. Even files that look unused may be linked through Dynamic Link or a nested sequence you cannot see from the file system.

Never empty the camera-card folder structure (CLIP, BPAV, PRIVATE, XDROOT, RDC) without confirming the camera originals are backed up somewhere else. Some cameras refuse to read cards if even one metadata file is missing.

If a folder has the word PROXY or PROXIES in it but the parent project is still active, leave it. Regenerating proxies for a 6-hour wedding shoot is not how anyone wants to spend a Sunday.

How to Plan the Cleanup Properly

Before you start deleting, get a sense of what kind of file lives where. A tool like GrandPerspective or DaisyDisk gives you a visual map of the drive in a few minutes. You can see immediately whether the bulk of your usage is camera originals, cache, or abandoned projects.

If you find that camera originals are less than half your total drive usage, you have a cleanup opportunity. Most working drives over two years old are 40 percent or more abandoned material, and camera originals are usually less than 50 percent of total despite being the actual reason the drive exists. The rest is overhead.

For a sense of how much storage your project library actually needs once the waste is removed, the storage calculator can give you a baseline number to compare against your current footprint. If you are storing 8 TB and the calculator says your real working set is 3 TB, you know exactly where the slack lives.

Before You Buy a Bigger Drive

Most editors solve "drive is full" by buying a bigger drive. That works for about six months, until the new drive fills the same way. The footage-to-cache ratio does not change. The abandoned project rate does not change. You just bought yourself more room to repeat the problem.

Before you spend on storage, it is worth knowing what is actually on the drive you have. Clip Sweeper can scan your Premiere projects and tell you precisely which media files are referenced on a timeline and which are sitting in bins doing nothing. If you find that 30 percent of your "active project" storage is footage that never made the cut, you might not need a bigger drive at all. You might just need to clear the deck on the one you own.